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Xiph.org Releases Theora Alpha One
Pajama Crisis writes "Xiph.org, the crazy guys behind Ogg Vorbis, have released the first alpha version of Ogg Theora, an open video codec. Downloading, hacking and smashing into little pieces is cheerfully encouraged. Theora has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Also, Xiph has been working with a couple different companies to bring Vorbis to a portable near you; stay tuned."
What is their long range plan? Are they leveraging themselves into a competitive positon?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Is this video codec any good? Does it provide any advantage over DivX ;-) ? Besides being an open video codec from the makers of ogg, what technical advantages are there to using it? If I make a video with it that is equivalent in quality to a 30 minutes 200MB divx will the quality be higher or file size be smaller without losing quality? If not it seems just another case of open source re-inventing the wheel. I mean, that's what ogg is, an open source re-invention of the wheel.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
No! I will hold onto my old, substandard techologies. Someday, my mp3's will be the Atari of today. How can you take that away from us, with decent products? Uncle M$ is going to be upset. =]
-Valiss
- First off, Vorbis concentrates its encoding in the more audible midrange, completely cutting out higher overtones. While MP3 works similarly, it manages to keep enough of the high range to maintain the "feel" of the original music. While you may not consciously notice this lack, there is an easy way to demonstrate it. Try singing along with a Vorbis track. You'll find that it's much more difficult to keep in tune, because the brain unconsciously uses inaudible overtones as a guide to determine the tone of the music when singing along. To put it bluntly, don't encode your karaoke tracks in Vorbis.
- Vorbis claims to support more than two channel audio, but this is misleading. MP3 encodes stereo using a "joint-stereo" method, which couples both tracks together into a mono track, giving each frame a different balance to simulate stereo on a mono track. This is equivalent to playing a mono tape and turning the balance knob! Obviously, this is less than optimal. While Vorbis supports true stereo encoding, it fakes 5.1-channel audio using a "joint-joint-stereo" method, where the left-back/left-front and right-back/right-front channels and joined together into the two stereo tracks in a similar fashion. Not very good at all.
- The way that Vorbis compresses its audio accelerates speaker degradation. It breaks sound up into an evenly-spaced array of harmonics which approximate the original waveform. "Big deal", you say, "that's how all lossy encoding schemes work!" But the way that Vorbis does it causes a noticeable amount of harmonic resonance in speaker systems, stressing their driver system and accelerating the rate at which they decay. If you know the story of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge, this is the same principle, working at a smaller and more gradual pace.
Given Xiph's poor track record with Vorbis, I'm not so sure their video encoding technology will make any serious inroads. It's not even really necessary; high-quality, open video standards such as MPEG-4 are already available and being adopted by all major players. If I were on Xiph's board of directors, I would suggest they spend more time improving Vorbis then creating yet another unnecessary standard.I've got to believe that the lack of hardware supporting Vorbis is the number one reason for its modest adoption rate.
I believe it's because the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think of hard-boiled eggs.
You know how it seems ridiculous that some companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants to think up names for their products? The excessive goofiness of the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think it might be worth it.